Eve

Born in Algeria in 1865, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, equally skilled as a ceramicist, painter, pastelist, and designer of furniture and interiors, ranks among the most accomplished ensembliers of the Symbolist movement. The present work, which was included in Lévy-Dhurmer’s first one-man show at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1896 when the artist was 31 years old, was created at an important turning point in his career. Largely self-taught, experimental in technique, and a notoriously solitary figure who eschewed the popular artistic movements of his day, Lévy-Dhurmer’s 1896 exhibition represented both his public and artistic breakthrough – establishing his reputation, but also cementing the artist’s move, a year on from having been introduced to the Symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach, into a more purely Symbolist milieu, the artistic expression of which he would pursue in the second half of his career.
In 1895, Lévy-Dhurmer, who six years earlier had given up on a promising painting career in Paris to relocate to the Côte d’Azur and focus on ceramics, made a trip to Italy which would prove formative for him. Captivated by the Renaissance paintings and architecture he saw in Venice and Florence, the artist returned to Paris, and to painting and drawing, renewed. Following his return to Paris, Lévy-Dhurmer was invited by the great Symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach, author of Bruges-la-morte, to create his portrait. The resulting portrait, executed in pastel, the artist’s favorite medium, is now in the Musée d'Orsay and was also included in the 1896 exhibition, which Rodenbach was very likely instrumental in helping Lévy-Dhurmer secure.
The exhibition at Georges Petit contained some 30 works, the vast majority of which were executed in pastel. Even in these early works, Lévy-Dhurmer’s singular artistic output was described by contemporary critics as ‘dream-like’, ‘poetic’ and ‘pensive.’ The qualities made pastel the perfect medium for the artist, lending his compositions an ethereal, velvety texture and soft tonal contrasts which heightened their mystical qualities. Even when working in oil, Lévy-Dhurmer sought to replicate the softness of his preferred medium, a distinctive and innovative technique recognizably his own. At least one critic saw clearly the connection to the Renaissance artists Lévy-Dhurmer had been so inspired by in Italy, likening him to ‘da Vinci, Botticelli and Memling, the ancients, the moderns…’. Another declared him both ‘a youth, a debutant and also a master’.
Certainly, the debt owed to his Renaissance forebearers is undeniable in the present Ève. Lévy-Dhurmer’s clearest quotation is from Botticelli’s Primavera, with its profusion of leaves and branches silhouetting the central figure. Just as Botticelli includes in his painting the branches along the upper register laden with oranges, so too does Lévy-Dhurmer use a similar patterning in studding the apples among the branches behind Eve. The flattened background, brought up close behind the figure of Eve, functions almost like a patterned Cloth of Honor silhouetting the Madonna would in an Italian gold-ground painting. The use of foliage to completely cover the background clearly also owes a debt to the mille-fleurs tapestries of the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods as well. By crossing Eve’s arms over her chest, Lévy-Dhurmer is able to reflect both the moments before and after The Fall in his composition. The snake emerges from the leaves and seems to whisper in her ear, the forbidden fruit held in her hand suggesting she has not yet made her fateful decision. And yet by crossing her arms over her chest and covering her with her extraordinary flowing golden hair, Lévy-Dhurmer also alludes to myriad depictions of Eve covering herself after The Fall and the Expulsion throughout art history, from Michelangelo and Tintoretto through to Rodin.